


Arbiter

by Ransomedbard



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Dark but with humor, Gen, Resurrecting is not as great as it sounds, Resurrection, Suicidal Thoughts, Thinking oh so much thinking, Violence of the bullets and blood variety
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-28
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-02-08 03:29:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12855798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ransomedbard/pseuds/Ransomedbard
Summary: After an accident in space, Duo learns that he cannot permanently die - but every resurrection comes at a terrible cost for those around him.  As he learns the extent of his powers, he struggles with the temptation to misuse them, and to find meaning in his devastating ‘gift’. His secret drives him away from the other pilots, even as he comes to realize his own loneliness and need for their friendship.





	1. Chapter 1

AC 195  
(5 weeks after Operation Meteor)  
Earth

_18, 17, 16…_

In the back of his mind, a steady beat counted down the seconds left as he scrabbed hand and foot in the dark over a rocky section of the hill. He wasn't going to make it back before the charges blew, of that he was sure; but even at his reduced pace he was only two minutes away from his Gundam. Once he cleared this ridge, he’d…

“Hands Up!”   
“Halt!”

_12, 11, 10…_

Two of them - just armed with handguns, but the one he could see had the draw on him. He could hear the other one moving behind him, taking a parallel line so there would be no crossfire.

_8,7,6…_

“I said put your hands up! Now!”

He lifted his head, looking out from under the brim of his cap. The soldier in front of him was close - good. Hopefully the other one was as well. He had no idea how close they had to be for this to work.

“Now!”

Oh yeah, hands. He slowly started to raise them, palms open.

_3,2,1..._

As his hands reached their apex, he balled his empty left hand into a fist and mimed pressing a trigger.

The base behind him exploded into orange fire.

The soldier in front of him fired three shots. The first hit his chest; the second, his neck; the third pierced his eye socket.

Without time for a last thought, Duo Maxwell fell down dead.

 

———————-

 

AC 193  
(17 months before Operation Meteor)  
L2 controlled space

 

“Secure this, Cadet."

  
Duo stared at the captain for a moment, his heart frantically beating, before he reached out with his free hand and took the toolbox, lifting it up and latching it into the concave underside of the “bull”. When he looked back, the captain was already bent over the engine again.

It was silent now; after the roar of impact and the whine of damaged electrical systems, the alarms and voices raised in frantic conversation, the rush to their space suits and the airlock. Now they were out on the battered skin of the courier __ship _The Weregild_ , engines dead and drifting towards a battle between L2 rebels and the Alliance.

Captain Kei had no love for the Alliance and their totalitarian grip on the colonies, but she wasn't part of any of the several rebel factions, either; she clung to the straight and narrow. (She had no idea what Duo’s group were up to - if she found out they were building a devastating new type of mobile suit, she probably would have turned them all in.) She clearly disliked Professor G - wouldn't even talk to him directly - but on occasion she would smuggle something small for him. In exchange for what, Duo never knew. More importantly, on those runs she would allow Duo to accompany her, as he hadn't yet been identified as a member of any rebel group.

Captain Kei was humorless, rigid, and lacking in imagination; she was also a highly skilled engineer who'd ended up piloting her own ship. Working with her would often drive the intuitive and impatient Duo crazy, but he came to see the value of her methodical approach to problem solving, and even strove to emulate her enough to temper his own style.

After the Maxwell church massacre, he'd learned not to get too close to anyone emotionally, which had paid off well in Professor G's outfit. (Rebellions do not attract the most stable minds, nor do they lead to healthy relationships - most everyone was paranoid of being ratted out to the Alliance.) Yet he had found an oddly companionable space in his time with Captain Kei; as far as he could tell she had no guile, no hidden motives, and no motivation beyond making enough to keep her ship in the air. If she enjoyed anything, it was keeping a schedule, pouring over her ship’s computer logs, and - after an awkward period where he had managed to earn her grudging respect - quietly teaching him through the repairs they made together on her aging vessel.

But they’d never had to repair anything as serious as what they faced now. As far as he could tell, they’d been struck by a tightly packed cluster of non-explosive rounds, which had struck them aft at an angle. Captain Kei quickly declared engines one and three a complete loss and set to scavenging parts from both to try to resurrect the last remaining engine. All the while, their trajectory was bringing them closer and closer to the battle.

Duo was shaken out of his reverie by a small noise of satisfaction. Snapping a micro welder onto the magnetic strip on her arm, Captain Kei clenched the dented drive block in both hands and rotated it back down, where it locked in place with a ‘thunk’ he felt through his boots. Then the captain sunk to her knees, half disappearing into the engine compartment as she began snapping retaining locks into place.

"Kei--" his earpiece crackled. She grunted. Duo’s group was supposed to maintain strict radio silence during their flights, as Captain Kei didn’t want the authorities intercepting any communication that could link her to them, but the dire situation had prompted Toca to get on the line and pester them for updates. Duo could tell the breach of protocol was pissing the captain off even more, but Toca was oblivious and wouldn’t stop. Talking was all Professor G’s group could do for now - they didn’t have a ship of their own close enough to assist, and no one else would enter the battle zone while it was hot.

Toca paused, then began again. "Damnit --"

Lights on the engine diagnostic panel suddenly lit up in sets of three; most of them were red, but four sets were blessedly yellow. Duo released a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.

"Number two engine restored to 40 percent." said Captain Kei, voice as dry as ever. "Closing up."

Duo began reorienting himself under the “bull” to face the aft airlock. Standard space suits were made tough enough to resist tearing and punctures, but couldn't stand up to any real damage. Enter the bull - a crude sheet of thick metal studded with handles that was a spacer's answer to the deadly threat posed by tiny meteorites and space debris. Commercial shield systems were available, but a bull was dirt cheap; every scrapyard in the colonies turned them out by the dozen. Most spacers kept a few of various sizes on board; this was their largest, and true to Captain Kei's style it had extra functional touches like attachment points for her tool cases.

Despite their popularity, the value of a bull against detritus was questionable - for one thing, they did nothing to allay a projectile's momentum, which could be considerable. As protection against a ship’s ordinance or missile, it was laughable. But it was all they had.

Behind him he felt the captain grab hold of the other end of the bull in preparation to begin moving. "Detaching your secondary line" she said, and after a second he felt the cable go slack and then reel itself up against his chest harness.

The ship's computer broke in over the com with a sudden claxon. “Proximity Alert: Weapons Fire Detected.”

“Double time, Cadet.” It was the first time Duo had ever heard Captain Kei sound worried.


	2. Chapter 2

They made their way across the hull in a steady lock-step; releasing one boot’s seal only when the other was attached. Try as they might, there was only so fast they could go, and a mistake would take time they didn’t have.

Duo glanced out in the direction of the battle, but there was nothing the naked eye could see - just the normal utter darkness of space, studded with brilliant stars, crazily whirling due to the momentum they’d gained from the engine strike. His shoulders were tightening up and he was clenching his jaw as he thought about what it would be like to get hit. He forced his focus back to the airlock, now just a dozen steps away.

Suddenly the airlock disappeared from view as he slammed face-first into the hull of the ship. A split second later white hot pain lanced up his right arm, which had been wrenched free of the bull. He became aware that he’d heard a sound over the com from the captain - breathy and ratting and very short. Disoriented, he tried to turn and find her, but was stopped by his boot locked to the hull. In the corner of his eye, he began to see tiny sparkles shooting out in tendrils and ribbons.

“Proximity Alert! Imminent Impact!” warned the computer, seconds too late.

_We got hit again_ , he realized. _The captain_. He turned as much as he could towards where she had been, locking his free boot to the hull, and struggling to release the locked one.

A new strident alert rang in his ears, with a different voice. “Emergency! Suit depressurization - seek air immediately!”

He released the boot lock, and finished his turn back.

The bull was smashed into the side of the ship, embedded into the plating of the hull. The impact had distorted it into a lopsided funnel cone, with a fist-sized ragged tear in the center where it breached the hull. Whatever had hit it had broken through and continued through the ship.

Captain Kei’s safety line ran under the bull. Under the bent edge he could see shapes that didn’t make sense.

“Emergency! Suit depressurization! Seek air immediately!”

Toca, unaware of what had just happened, broke in. “Status - are you at the airlock yet?”

Duo’s mind was spinning wildly, hands reaching out towards the captain even as his torso started to twist back to the airlock. The ice crystals from the air leaking out of the holes in the back of his helmet were surrounding him like a mist, reflecting starlight, disorienting him even more. His broken right arm pulsed in agonizing jolts.

His left hand reached up, switching on his helmet lights as he made up his mind and turned back towards the bull. Tears sprung up from the pain as he reached down with both arms and unlocked his last boot, pushing off to gain momentum and dragging his body against the ship, reaching out for the captain’s safety line floating a few meters away.

He caught it, thin in his bulky gloves, and wrapped his bad arm around it, stopping his momentum. He needed a carabiner - no, he would just pull it. He grabbed the slack with his good hand and wound it dangerously around his arms, entangling himself in his frenzied haste.

His face was burning and the ice cloud was all around him now. He pulled and pulled and then he gasped and there wasn’t enough air, and he panicked and gasped again. Too late, he tried to turn back to the airlock, but all he could do was hyperventilate in the near vacuum. The last thing he remembered was going blind, his only sensation the safety cord wrapped around his arms…

 

He jolted to consciousness with a start, pain burning his face. His arms were floating in a slack mess of wire. He looked back at the bull and saw the torn remains of Captain Kei’s suit drifting at the end of the line. She was definitely dead.

He tried to get a boot back on the ship. It took him a few tries and he realized he was holding his breath. He tried to breathe and the pain only increased, as did his fear. _I’m suffocating!_

The airlock was far, too far. He grabbed his safety line. Could he reel in? No, he was still caught in Captain Kei’s line. It was so hard to see. He pushed at the tangle with both hands, finally easing it off his right wrist. He was blind now, panicking, but he slapped the reel release and felt it pull him before he succumbed to the pain.

 

It took him a second to understand he was floating by the airlock. Everything hurt, on fire. He reached out to the airlock and found the handles, pulled closer. It was so quiet. He put his hand in the mechanism, twisted the inner handle to the open position. The door sprung open and he hauled himself inside. He couldn’t see. _Gotta release the reel_ , he realized. He fumbled with stiff fingers and snapped it off, then groped around for the airlock closing mechanism. _Please, please…_ his mind was screaming as he triggered the inner lock and realized the repressurization had begun because he could finally hear something. But it was too late. He died again.


	3. Chapter 3

Duo came to floating inside the repressurized air lock. Toca was on the com, sounding increasingly worried. “Kei, damnit, what is taking so long? Duo? Duo, answer me!” 

He struggled a bit with his helmet before he got it off, gulping big breaths of stale ship’s air. He felt terribly disoriented, and sluggishly cold. He tried to put his thoughts in order.

The captain was... dead. The ship had taken another hit, not far aft of the airlock he’d just come in from - so in the cargo bay. He rotated around to face the back bulkhead, grabbing a handle on the wall to pull himself closer. It looked undamaged, and the cabin was still airtight, so no immediate danger there. He rested his gloved hand on that wall, and its solidness grounded his agitated mind. _Move the ship now_ , he told himself. _That’s the mission_.

He shed his space suit boots and gloves on the way to the cockpit, but kept his helmet tucked under his arm until he strapped himself into the co-pilot’s seat and left it floating down by his feet. Then he set to flipping the switches to transfer control from the pilot’s console. This part was so familiar he didn’t even have to think about anything until he automatically put his headset on and immediately got an earful of Toca, who was now frantic. 

He broke in. “This is Duo. The captain...Captain Kei is gone.”

“Duo! What do you mean ‘gone’? Are you aboard?”

“She...yes. I am. It was another round. Non-explosive. It hit the bull.” His breath caught in his throat and the words stopped coming out. He tried to start again. “She was - she was under…I couldn’t…” His voice dropped to a whisper. _“I couldn’t...”_

His heart was hammering in his chest and his vision was blurring. In front of him warning lights were flashing urgently, and the console screens were filled with critical alerts demanding his attention, but his hands hovered motionless over the controls. He heard Toca talking to someone else, but it was so muffled he couldn’t make it out. He felt like his mind was going numb. 

_Move_ , he told himself, and he ripped the headset off. That broke him out of his paralysis and he refocused on his console. _Clear the alerts_ , and when he had done that, his mind felt a little sharper. Next, he had to override the safeguards so he could initiate a manual restart sequence on the one remaining engine. His fingers picked up speed, routing direct control of the engine to his instruments. Gently he coaxed the battered drive to life, fighting to keep it under control until the reaction was stable. 

Desperate to stop heading deeper into the battle zone, he skipped trying to correct the ship’s rapid spin. Instead, he focused on feeding the engine precise bursts of fuel at the right points of the ship’s rotation to alter her course enough to curve away from the battle. It was a grueling couple of minutes. He had to remain hyper focused on his instruments and timing; every correction also altered the erratic spin. His ears rang with the urgent siren of more weapons fire alerts - he couldn’t spare eye or hand to silence them - punctuated by the angry shriek of the damaged engine every time he gave it a burst of fuel. At last there came a moment when he could tell it was working, and soon after that the ship’s heading was nosing into the clear. He pushed as long a burn as he dared on the struggling engine to pick up speed. There was a sudden silence as the alerts stopped and the warning lights went dark simultaneously. The ship had crossed the threshold of the combat warning zone and was now accelerating away from danger.

He closed his eyes for a minute, floating slack in the harness. Despite the chill he still felt down to his bones, he had a light sheen of sweat, his skin clammy. He hung there for a while, just glad to breathe. 

When he opened his eyes his gaze fell on his helmet floating nearby. Pulling it closer, he studied the constellation of scratches on the front and the six small uneven holes - three entry, three exit - that had pierced the back horizontally, behind his ears. He must have been leaking air pretty fast - it was surprising he had made it back inside before he asphyxiated. That thought brought back a sudden jumble of fresh memories, each of a different kind of intense pain. His right arm was broken, wasn’t it? He felt it up and down - it seemed fine. And he had been in tremendous pain all over, like his skin was boiling and his eyes burning - but nothing hurt now and his vision was sharp. Most of all he remembered the sheer panic of suffocating until he blacked out - not once, but somehow over and over again. 

Adrenaline could cover up pain, he knew - but he was over that surge now, into the after phase; and his body, while shaky, seemed otherwise fine. Too many things were coming back to him, with terrifyingly clear detail. Had his oxygen-starved brain hallucinated all of this?

With a growing sense of dread, he turned his helmet over and reached in to retrieve the integrated com box from the inner lining. In doing so, he discovered streaks of cold, dry blood spattered on the inside. Disbelieving, he ghosted a gloved fingertip over a rusty red stain and a fine mist of particles sprung up and hung weightless in the air.

The skin on his arms stood up in goosebumps.

He reached up into the co-pilot’s locker and brought out his laptop. He had no idea what he would find on his suit’s com recorder, but he already knew he wanted to make sure no record of it would be in _The Weregild’s_ logs. He snapped the helmet’s logging module into a port on the side of his PC and started copying the data. While that was running, he freed himself from the seat harness and took the helmet into the head to clean it off. 

When he caught a look at himself in the mirror, he stopped cold. Dry, powdery blood splatters stained his ears and nose, and lightly shaded the skin around his lips. Around his eyes was residue of something clearer, slightly gummy. He recognized the patterns - so much like the explosives they were training him to use. His blood vessels and soft tissues had explosively decompressed in the vacuum. He should be gravely injured - and blind. 

_No - I should be dead._

He grabbed a handful of the all-purpose moist wipes from the wall dispenser and scrubbed gently at his face. The skin under the blood was healthy and undamaged. He let out a little laugh that had a hysterical edge to it. 

_Why am I disappointed?_

He drifted back as far as he could in the tiny room and took another look at himself in the mirror. He couldn’t see much; from the neck down, he was covered up by his space suit. He had removed his bulky outer gloves and magnetic boots, but still wore the light gloves and soft shoes that went under them. He eased a glove off of one hand. Bloody powder flowed out of his wrist sleeve like a magician’s trick, tinting the air in a red plume. His hand was coated with a cracked crust of dark red; the sweat and dried blood had mingled and then dried again. Under his suit, his whole body must be covered in his own blood. 

He grabbed the end of his ponytail with his gloved hand and took the hair tie off, fitting it over his open wrist sleeve to cinch it tight and stop any more dried blood from flowing out. Then he cleaned off his bare hand and turned the glove inside out, scrubbing and squeezing with wet wipes until no more red came off. He slipped the clean glove back on, transferred the hair tie to the other wrist, then repeated the process with the other hand. Now that he was aware of it, the feeling of dried blood on his body under the suit was deeply disturbing, but there was nothing he could do about that for now - the small courier ship had no shower, and with no gravity the powder would go everywhere. He would have to keep sealed up until he could clean up later. 

At least he could clean his face. He subjected it to a minute inspection from every angle he could manage, making sure he got the back of his neck and his hair. Then he took a fresh set of wipes to the inside of the helmet. While it was drying he traced the edges of the tiny holes in the back. That needed to be fixed - they didn’t have a spare. Glad for a few moments of distraction, he found the suit repair kit and mixed up a small batch of vacuum-grade epoxy, then applied it to the holes sandwiched between small sheets of reinforced fiberglass patch tape. It smelled horrible. He latched a hook to an air uptake vent on the ceiling and hung the helmet near it to try to vent some of the fumes. He was still fiddling with it when his laptop chimed to let him know the file transfer was complete.

After triple checking that the data had copied successfully, he changed directory into his collection of data manipulation tools. Some had been given to him as part of his training, but he’d picked up others from his own rooting around on various private intranets on the colonies they visited. He picked one of those, just in case someone back at their base got curious and decided to snoop around in his suit after he got back. The program would exploit a vulnerability in the logging module’s firmware, then use that direct access to issue commands to overwrite certain sectors of the log data so often that the storage media would fail, making it impossible to recover the files.

While it ran, he composed himself for a call back to Toca, who was probably going to bite his head off for leaving him hanging earlier. There was no way he could bring the badly damaged ship into the originally scheduled port in this condition - he would be detained for questioning and their cargo would be impounded. He need a new plan to get himself and the cargo off the ship without getting caught by the Alliance.

———-

Four hours later, he left _The Weregild_ for the last time, having brought her to a dead stop and shut down everything except her emergency homing beacons, which he had set to send out a distress call. They had scuttled her in a moderately trafficked area, so there was a good chance someone would pick up the signal before too long. 

He hated to leave the captain like this; it has the bitter taste of the deaths of his childhood, when the gangs would just abandon their dying or dead on the street in front of the hospital. The guilt of running away from someone at their most vulnerable rose up in him again; it was a shame that had only deepened as he gotten older and gained more perspective. The abandoning of their own was the final injustice in a short life that had seen many.

But he knew this was different. Captain Kei was no homeless child. She had friends that needed what was still on that ship - something to bury, a focus to mourn. He couldn’t tell them what had happened - had in fact spent the remainder of his time on board trying to cleanse the ship’s computer of any trace related to Professor G’s group and their involvement in her final mission. But he’d left enough of the logs intact that they’d be able to know how she died, to gain closure that she had been true to herself, defied the odds, and fixed her battered ship one last time before her luck ran out.

 

He was alone in the passenger compartment of the small craft that had come to get him, staring out the window at _The Weregild_ hovering nearby. Their rescued cargo and his few belongings were stacked on the seat next to him. He felt the thrumming under his feet intensify as the pilot fired up the engines and they began moving. 

Duo took off a glove and pressed his hand to the freezing glass. As they accelerated away, the exterior lights stopped illuminating the fallen ship, and it disappeared into the inky blackness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had some trouble with this chapter. 
> 
> I was trying to cram a lot of things in. I primarily wanted to build some sense of disquiet for Duo as he starts to discover what’s happened to him, but I also wanted a panic attack of sorts when he has to deal with piloting the ship out of a dangerous situation alone.
> 
> I also am conflicted with what to do with the non-canon characters. I figure that you came to read about GW characters from the show, so I’m trying to limit the original characters’ role and impact. But in the case of Captain Kei, I wanted her death to mean something to Duo, as his reaction helps define what kind of person he is, so I felt he should spend some time thinking of her before I closed out the chapter.
> 
> And I’m trying to keep the tone dark but not disgusting. I didn’t want to be too graphic about what happened during the deaths in space, so I tried to just hint at the worst effects - like frozen, bursting eyeballs :0 
> 
> Thank you for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to gwblockparty on Tumblr for organizing their ‘Unnatural November’ Event which prompted me to try writing a story of my own, and also for their kind help.


End file.
